Stephen Phillips
Stephen Phillips (28 July 1864 - 9 December 1915) was an English poet, actor, and dramatist, who enjoyed considerable popularity in his lifetime. Life Phillips was born at Summertown near Oxford, the son of the Rev. Stephen Phillips, precentor of Peterborough Cathedral. He was educated at Stratford and Peterborough Grammar Schools, and considered entering Queens' College, Cambridge on a minor scholarship to study classics; but he instead went to a London crammer to prepare for the civil service.J.P. Wearing, ‘Phillips, Stephen (1864–1915)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edn, Jan 2008. Web, 1 June 2009 In 1885, however, he moved to Wolverhampton to join his cousin F.R. Benson's dramatic company, and for 6 years he played various small parts. Poet In 1890 a slender volume of verse was published at Oxford with the title Primavera, which contained contributions by him and by his cousin Laurence Binyon and others.Primavera: poems (1890), Internet Archive, Web, June 23, 2012. In 1894 he published Eremus, a long poem of loose structure in blank verse of a philosophical complexion. In 1896 appeared Christ in Hades, forming with a few other short pieces one of the slim paper-covered volumes of Elkin Mathews's Shilling Garland. This poem arrested the attention of watchful critics of poetry, and when it was followed by a collection of Poems in 1897 the writer's position as a new poet of exceptional gifts was generally recognized. This volume contained a new edition of "Christ in Hades", together with "Marpessa", "The Woman with the Dead Soul", "The Wife", and shorter pieces, including "To Milton, Blind". The volume won the prize of £100 offered by the ''Academy'' newspaper for the best new book of its year, ran through half a dozen editions in two years, and established Phillips's rank as poet, which was sustained by the publication, in the Nineteenth Century in 1898 of his poem Endymion. Playwright Sir George Alexander, the actor-manager, moved perhaps by a certain clamour among the critics for a literary drama, then commissioned Phillips to write him a play, the result being Paolo and Francesca (1900), a drama founded on Dante's famous episode from ''Inferno''. Encouraged by the great success of the drama in its literary form, Mr Alexander produced the piece at the St. James' Theatre in 1902.Produced by Sir George Alexander at the St. James' Theatre beginning 6 March 1902. Mason, p. 237. Phillips's next play, Herod: a tragedy, had been produced by Beerbohm Tree on the 31st of October 1900, and was published as a book in 1901; Ulysses, also produced by Beerbohm Tree, was published in 1902; The Sin of David, a drama on the story of David and Bathsheba, translated into the times and terms of Cromwellian England, was published in 1904; and Nero, produced by Beerbohm Tree, was published in 1906. In these plays the poet's avowed aim was, instead of attempting to revive the method of Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, to revitalize the method of Greek drama. Paolo and Francesca (which admitted certainly one scene on an Elizabethan model) was the most successful. The Encyclopædia Britannica says that "Phillips was compared to Shakespeare for Paolo and Francesca (1900), but his reputation soon declined, and he died in poverty." He died in Deal, Kent.Stephen Phillips, Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., Web, June 23, 2012. Writing Critical introduction by Sidney Calvin In regard to this poet the critical pendulum had for some years before his death swung sharply from the side of over-praise to that of over-neglect. It will some day recover its equilibrium, and Phillips will then be recognized as having belonged, by the gift of passion (“the all-in-all in poetry,” as Lamb has it,) by natural largeness of style and pomp and melody of rhythm and diction, as well as by intensity of imaginative vision in those fields where his imagination was really awake, to the great lineage and high tradition of English poetry. Yes, too directly to the lineage and too faithfully to the tradition, the advocatus diaboli may interpose. It has been especially charged against him that his blank verse too closely reproduces the cadences of Milton and of Tennyson. But this is to mistake absorption, which is one thing, for imitation, which is quite another. It is true that he was no great metrical inventor or innovator, though some of his experiments in unrhymed lyric — for instance, "A Gleam" and "The Revealed Madonna" ... are to my mind among the most successful that have been tried in English. But he was able to stamp an individuality, strong though not revolutionary or eccentric, on blank verse whether narrative or dramatic, on the closed “heroic” couplet, that form almost disused since the romantic revival, and on such ancient and popular never-to-be-worn out measures as the familiar alternately rhyming eight and six. As to originality not of form but of matter, it may be observed that when Phillips chose to rehandle themes on which predecessors, even the greatest, had set their mark, so far from imitating, he for better or worse always attacked them according to conceptions of his own. His Endymion, a thing over-mannered and far from first-rate, is in conception and treatment wholly independent of Keats. Other good cases in point are the two short pieces, The Parting of Launcelot and Guinevere, a Tennysonian theme wrought without Tennyson’s cunning technique but with an intensity of passion beyond his reach, and the admirably vivid tragic vision of Beatrice Cenci in the little lyric so named, which might have been written just as it is had Shelley not existed. Other criticisms directed against Phillips’s work have more foundation than the charge of imitativeness. He worked more by gusts of inspiration than by sustained care in craftsmanship, and often allowed a lax or feeble line to intrude even into his finest passages. He was also too prone to self-repetition and to that form of poetical rhetoric which consists in trying to reinforce an idea or heighten an image by rewording it over again with no essential change of thought. Subject to these besetting flaws, he has left achievements of striking personality and power in a wide range of themes. In handling the simple, direct, universal human joys and sorrows, the longings and regrets, connected with the sexual and conjugal, the parental and filial relations, his touch is often as new and revealing as it is tender. For the sense of the past in the present, the stirrings of far-off legendary association, the apprehension of vibrating cosmic sympathies between the external universe and man aroused in the human spirit in moments of emotional tension or tragic passion — for these he found forms of utterance which were beautiful and entirely his own. Themes of mystical religion and gropings beyond the grave were never far from his thoughts and inspired much of his work, to my mind rarely of his best, from Christ in Hades down to The New Inferno. There is a distressful power and sadness, a sadness sometimes rising to the pitch of agony, in some poems of personal confession and supplication forced upon him by the struggle against enemies within himself stronger than he could resist. Passing to work done in more objective moods, he has left some presenting with true power and originality impressions of character and destiny among crushed and suffering city lives. His surface observation both of the crowd and individuals was intense: his divination and suggestion of histories behind the surface imaginative and penetrating.... In his later years he was accustomed to take poetic note of the changing aspects brought into the world by the progress of mechanical invention, the disappearance of sails from the sea, the invasion of the sky by aëroplanes and the like. Such notes, adroitly and tellingly written as they often are, hardly rise sufficiently above the level of newspaper verse to survive for their own sake as poetry, though they will be of interest in retrospect as marking the effect of these changes on a powerful and sensitive spirit in their day. So far I have said nothing of the dramas which after the year 1900 absorbed most of Phillips’s energies and constitute by far the chief bulk of his work. His later attempts in that form, Iole, The Adversary, The King, and Armageddon, may, I think, be dismissed as giving evidence of exhausted faculties and containing only here and there a phrase or line or two of the old power. Faust was a collaboration piece and made small pretension to originality. There remain the five, Paolo and Francesca, Herod, Ulysses, Nero, and The Sin of David. Several of these have proved successful on the stage: all have scenes and passages of stirring beauty and power. It has been objected to them that the poet, having been an actor and working with actors, has constructed his plays with too obvious and mechanical a stagecraft; that they are weak in the elements of character creation; that the persons are not made to speak vitally from within, but to describe and expound themselves in speeches put into their mouths from without, as it were decoratively and artificially; that the speeches themselves are too rhetorical, and the rhetoric often too ornate and flowery and sometimes redundant and tautological. Against this it may justly be urged that, after all, knowledge of stagecraft is a good thing in a playwright, and that Phillips’s aim in drama was intended to be on Greek lines much rather than on Shakespearian: that the intense, the Shakespearian individualization of characters has been no part of the aim, still less of the achievement, of tragic drama in some of the great literatures of the world,— it is not a capital element either in the Greek drama or the classical French: and again, that rhetoric in poetic drama there needs must be, and between the right and appropriate rhetoric of a situation, when it is touched with passion and imagination, as much of it in these plays truly is,—between such rhetoric and truly great dramatic poetry the line is difficult to draw, if it can be drawn at all.from Charles L. Graves, "Critical Introduction: Charles Stuart Calverley (1831–1884)," The English Poets: Selections with critical introductions (edited by Thomas Humphry Ward). New York & London: Macmillan, 1880-1918. Web, Mar. 29, 2016. Publications Poetry *''Orestes, and other poems''. London: privately published, 1884. *''Primavera: Poems by four authors'' (Laurence Binyon, Arthur Shearly Cripps, Manmohan Ghose, Stephen Phillips). Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1890. *''Eremus: A poem''. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1894. *''Christ in Hades, and other poems. London: Elkin Mathews, 1896. *Poems. London & New York: John Lane, 1898. *Marpessa. London & New York: John Lane, 1900. *''Grief and God. London: privately published, 1905. *''New Poems. London & New York: John Lane, 1907. *The New Inferno. London & New York: John Lane, 1910. *Panama, and other poems: Narrative and occasional. London & New York: John Lane, 1915. Plays *Paolo and Francesca: A tragedy in five acts. London & New York: John Lane, 1900. *Herod: A tragedy. London & New York: John Lane, 1901. *Ulysses: A drama in a prologue and three acts. London & New York: Macmillan, 1902, 1915. *The Sin of David. London & New York: Macmillan, 1904. *''Nero. London & New York: Macmillan, 1906. *''Iole: A tragedy in one act''. London: John Lane, 1908. *''Faust'' (with J. Comyns Carr). London: Macmillan, 1908. *''Pietro of Siena: A drama. London & New York: Macmillan, 1910. *''The King: A tragedy in a continuous series of scenes. London: S. Swift, 1912. *''The Adversary''. London: John Lane, 1913. *''Nero's Mother''. London: John Lane, 1915. *''Armageddon: A modern epic drama. London & New York: John Lane, 1915. *Collected Plays. London & New York: Macmillan, 1921. Collected editions *Lyrics and Dramas. London & New York: John Lane, 1913. ''Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.Search results = au:Stephen Phillips, WorldCat, OCLC Online Computer Library Center Inc. Web, Mar. 29, 2016. See also * List of British poets * List of English-language playwrights References * Mason, A.E.W. (1935). Sir George Alexander & The St. James' Theatre. Reissued 1969, New York: Benjamin Blom. * Whittington-Egan, Richard (2006). Stephen Phillips: A Biography. Rivendale Press. ISBN 1-904201-01-6. * See the section on Stephen Phillips in Poets of the Younger Generation, by William Archer (1902); also the articles on Tragedy and Mr Stephen Phillips, by William Watson in the Fortnightly Review (March 1898); The Poetry of Mr Stephen Phillips, in the Edinburgh Review (January 1900); Mr Stephen Phillips, in the Century (January 1901), by Edmund Gosse; and Mr Stephen Phillips, in the Quarterly Review (April 1902), by Arthur Symons. Notes External links ;Poems * "A Dream" * "Beautiful Lie the Dead" *Phillips in The English Poets: An anthology: "Marpessa," "A Poet's Prayer," "The Fireman," "Penelope to Ulysses," "Beatrice Cenci," "The Parting of Launcelot and Guinevere," "A Gleam!," "The Revealed Madonna" * Stephen Phillips at PoemHunter (8 poems) *Stephen Phillips at Poetry Nook (25 poems) ;Books * *Works by Stephen Phillips at Internet Archive ;About * Stephen Phillips: A Biography" * Original article is at "Stephen Phillips" Category:1868 births Category:1915 deaths Category:English poets Category:English dramatists and playwrights Category:People from Oxford